Like LOCKS And KEYS
by TanglepathTwelve
Summary: Proteins which do not fold correctly do not work correctly. If you don't think it through, somebody else is gonna break your truth. Roxas is quite sure it all adds up, but Axel... well...   Akuroku


**Like LOCKS And KEYS**

**=T12=**

If Roxas was the Key, then Axel was his Lock. Roxas didn't know what he had the key to, but Axel certainly had a lock on him. No matter where he went, he was found. No matter how he stood, he felt the crosshairs on his chest. And no matter what he did, Axel kept him exactly where he wanted him.

Axel could track him, Axel could break him, Axel could make him feel things he hadn't known could be felt. Sensations- and emotions. In other words, Axel could fix him, even when he was inflicting pain.

Roxas had two keys. He was told that one went to his destiny, and sometimes he wondered if the other might not go to Axel's heart. or his mind, or whatever it was the lot of them were running on.

For all intents and purposes, Axel did a very good job of being unlocked already. He was spontaneous, impulsive, at times even crazy. He was reckless, never thoughtless, a leader, a deviator, and the spotlights followed him. Nothing about him changed when they were alone.

Roxas only knew he was any different because Axel, for some reason he wasn't aware of, had told him so. It had been suspiciously easy to recognize the signs once Axel had leaned in close and whispered, "It's all a game to me."

Axel was an actor, a liar, a free agent, and a saboteur. He had no morals, but his lack of morals pertained only to himself and was not directed toward anyone else. When he didn't have an agenda or a goal, he had a brand of psychological entertainment. He never answered all the questions, and didn't ever let there be one absolute answer.

All of those things Roxas saw as locks, locks that went to little steel boxes, kept their secrets and motivations from him. He wanted to open the boxes, so he had to figure out the locks.

Like a sophisticated lockpick, he changed himself to fit the grooves and slots of Axel's aspects. He learned Axel's lines, his stage presence, and Axel played off of him during the delicate manuevers. Because it's easier to people two people telling you the same thing, and they went far.

He sat still and watched until he found Axel's nervous tick, the one that betrayed his lies. It was almost nothing, really, just a few small hand gestures. Roxas taught Axel not to do them, and watched him win even more at politics, and watched how he reverted back to them when they talked, and thought, He trusts me.

He made sure that he stayed true to himself and his twin goals, so that Axel could do what he needed, what he wanted, to do and then come back to what was safe and familiar. Underneath the surface, he was the inner base Axel himself did not possess. And Axel always came back, sometimes wanting a second opinion on his latest plans.

He experimented with the others, slipped away to figure out what their worlds ran on. So many things could be revealed when you gave someone the merest trace of control, of power. Once he learned their fuel, Axel burned it up. He became an informant.

Roxas played around with principles. He temporarily adopted or suspended a few, to see how Axel matched them when he found out- how low he would go, how high he would strive to be considered worthy. He saw Axel stop short of permanently hurting him, and saw that he was also selfish- he wouldn't let Roxas leave him. He saw how little Axel needed other people's favorable opinions, and saw that he also had a conscience, and that occasionally Axel's kind of guilt actually fit his own reasons for deserving it. He mentally mapped out Axel's moral path- length, width, where it branched off, and where it was little more than a footpath between the trees. What Axel was truly capable of.

After that, it was relatively easy to figure out Axel's thought process when he set out to play with minds. Using this knowledge, he began to note the handful of prescribed responses Axel tailored to each person he interacted with, and thus his real opinion of them. Roxas was unwilling to realize exactly how Axel saw him- what would happen to their relationship then? Besides, his mission was only to unlock Axel, not himself. Destiny was determined beforehand, it didn't matter how he saw himself if his ultimate goal was already written in stone.

In any case, Axel immediately saw it when Roxas started playing his game, and then it was no longer between the two of them. After that they took on the minds of the Organization and the world together.

Once they were an equal team, Roxas started working on Axel's last lock. He'd learned that Axel put on shows to play tricks, he lied to make points, he only implemented ideas that gave him a challenge; he kept his morals to himself so he couldn't kill in cold blood, and he messed with minds for gain, not fun, though the aftermath was looter's paradise. Roxas even knew the goal, to take over the Organization and keep it a heartless fighting force- never mind that some were killed during the takeover, more could be made later.

None of it explained to him why Axel was so opportunistic, why he had to have a back door at all times and why he would never commit to one solution, one course of action, even when the obvious choice was the easiest and the safest and the most logical.

The second he realized he'd come up against a wall, he also realized what had happened. How could he have not noticed it before? In his quest to understand Axel, Roxas had adapted himself too well, become utterly the man's perfect tool and perfect weapon. And now Roxas didn't know what that meant- whether that was good or bad, an advantage, a weakness, the right thing to be, or the wrong thing to become.

He couldn't understand it the first time it hit him, and so he did what he'd trained himself to do. Instead of pausing and allowing the idea time to filter into comprehensible pieces, like he would have done before he'd started all of this, he acted- blindly, impulsively, reaching for the response that would give the most reward.

Just like Axel. Just like how he'd made himself. It made perfect sense at the time. he figured that if he couldn't understand it, then the bit of Axel that didn't make sense either was the key. He threw off one of Axel's doors, made it so he couldn't escape, and when Axel came running, he ran into the trap.

After he'd done it, Roxas had been afraid. Afraid of his own thinking that had caused him to act outside of himself, afraid hat he didn't know what that really was anymore. Afraid that Axel would sense it and call him out and demand an explanation.

He was even more afraid when Axel didn't even notice, when he fell for it completely.

But after Axel looked at him with bright light in his eyes and told him, "Thank you," Roxas wasn't afraid anymore.

He was angry, because he'd finally found out. Axel could never decide because he was afraid. he did it all because he was scared- scared because even with everything he could do, everything he was, he couldn't see how his choices would affect the future. All that Axel was existed only in one moment, the one moment that was currently in the process of happening. And in order to survive, the future had to be yours to manipulate. And unlike Roxas, Axel had no way to change himself.

Roxas didn't like that. After everything he had done, all of the irrevocable marks he'd made upon himself- this was the answer he got? That Axel was _afraid?_

No, it couldn't be true. There had to be something else, if only he could fit himself into the right frame of mind to see it, there had to be... didn't there have to be? There was no way he'd found the core of who Axel was. No one could do that- to anything. Something about the way the world worked prevented that, didn't it?

"Why do you do this?" he shouted, feeling betrayed and so, so confused. "Why is any of this happening? What is the reason we've chosen this way and none of the others?"

Axel smiled.

"Answer me!"

"The reason this is happening right now is that before, I had all of my options open. Then you picked one and closed it, and messed up my balance because I didn't know. So the laws of fate mandated that of course I would pick the one option out of a dozen that wasn't going to work, because that's what happens to people like me."

"That wasn't what I was asking." Roxas's voice was quiet now, calmer. He had begun to accept what was coming. He had found what Axel was after all.

"I know it wasn't. What you asked if why I'm on this road, why I want to end up where we're going to end up, being kings of this world. My answer is: because of you. The way the rest of them want to treat you, they'll kill you in the end. Now me, I could be anything at all that I want, I would do fine, I would survive, I would have some amount of power. I wouldn't have to work very hard to be successful. But i don't like the idea of that. I want to do something that I have to think about, something to fight with while I figure it out. The ordinary routes are too easy, so they have no purpose for me.

"But you, Roxas, you are different. You are special to all of us, in all different ways. At first, I thought you were my ticket to the top, power _and_ pleasure, just because everybody wanted you. Then I saw what you can do, and I thought you were worthy of sharing power with, that you could be an ally. And then I saw who you were, and I knew that I would do it all, for you, and then I would give it to you, because by the time I saw the truth I had nothing else to give you. And all this time, you were everything I could have ever wanted, everything I didn't even _know_ I wanted."

And then Axel said, "And because of that, I love you, Roxas. But I would have loved you anyway."

Roxas saw it unfold perfectly in front of him. Of course, Axel needed his challenges to feel worth. And he _was_ ambitious, the boy had long since accepted that. And he _was_ selfish, and he _did_ have a screwed-up sense of guilt to make him think he had to give it all away to get what he most wanted. And he _was_afraid sometimes- of losing in his mission, and of losing Roxas.

And Roxas knew in that instant that he had completely figured Axel out, unlocked all his steel boxes and found the keyhole to his heart. And that had led flawlessly into the search for the other keyhole, his destiny. It all fit so well, he had no doubt, and every word Axel said made such perfect sense, because Roxas had gotten what he'd wanted and could see how Axel thought.

None of it made any difference at all, because Axel had said he loved him and Axel could make him feel and together they'd done the impossible. They had found out how to love even without hearts.

Roxas didn't want, or need, anything else but that knowledge, and he let the euphoria rush through him, and it blocked out the tiny circles Axel's fingers made in the air as they twirled and twirled and lied.

Axel kissed Roxas and laughed inside because he'd seen it all on the boy's face. The fear, and the anger, and the denial of what he'd found, and then the light as everything had matched up, and how he'd fallen off the edge when Axel said love.

Axel knew, of course, that Roxas had largely figured him out by this point. And that was okay, because it felt nice to have his reasons out there somewhere, to be able to share the weight of them with someone else. And by now he knew the boy could never go back to how he'd been- he was Axel's perfect match now, and he could be trusted.

Axel laughed because he'd seen Roxas find the paradox and then make his own loophole. It was all an illusion, that was why it was funny. People always, without exception, saw what they wanted to see, Because of the way Roxas had learned him, Axel had known that Roxas would think it was fear that drove him, and so he'd said what Roxas wanted to hear and watched him draw all the wrong conclusions.

Of course you could never figure out the true heart of anybody else. Yourself- yes, maybe, if you tried hard enough. But not anyone else, because reality didn't like you. he didn't even respect you, so he sent his lackey fate to deal with you instead, and that was as far as you got. Ever.

He'd unwittingly spared himself a lot of trouble, too, because it was basically guaranteed now that Roxas would act exactly how he wanted, how he would think to if given a second thought. Roxas would be his backup and together they would win. Because Axel did love Roxas, always had, always would, always would have even if this had ever come about.

Axel just didn't love in the way Roxas did, the way you were supposed to. It was kind of like having a house key and a lock on your front door, each being a different brand, but one or the other being broken so that they worked together, and as long as you could get inside your house after a long day at work, you never noticed. Maybe the lock was broken, maybe the key- maybe he and Roxas weren't meant to work out together but because Roxas had changed, they would now.

And then, even if you noticed, finally, one day, that the two didn't match up, as long as the key kept opening the lock, you would keep on accepting it as the way of things.

Maybe it would keep on working, this mismatched alignment of thoughts, this improbable connection of lock and key. Maybe not. It didn't quite matter to Axel.

Because, of course, Roxas had it all wrong.

Axel wasn't doing it all for him.

Axel wasn't doing it all for anyone, because there was no master plan.

There was no final, glorious goal.

Because, of course, Axel was exactly who he'd always been, ever since the beginning of this little tale of chance.

He was spontaneous, impulsive, sometimes he was crazy. He was reckless, never thoughtless, a leader and a deviator. He was the same in public and private, and the spotlights followed him.

He had no use for little steel boxes, or secrets, or locks.

He didn't need keys. He didn't need love.

Axel, of course, did it all for fun.

**FIN.**


End file.
